Tag: City Council

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Seventh Time’s the Charm?

Gender, neutral, term limits, Memphis, City Council,

“You have to give the public something,” explained termed-out former Councilperson Emily Evans, a few years ago. She was referring to a 2015 initiative she had pushed. The unsuccessful measure had tempted voters with a smaller council in exchange for weakened term limits.

On Tuesday’s ballot, voters find lame attempt number seven by Metro Nashville Council’s to weaken or repeal their own term limits. As I told readers of the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, that makes for a council-forced do-over on term limits every 3.4 years for the last 24 years — since 1994, when greater than 76 percent of Nashville-Davidson County voters passed a consecutive two-term limit on councilmembers.

Voters have repeatedly said no to the council. 

But this time there is a twist, an incredibly enticing enticement having been carefully coupled with the undercutting of term limits. Only totally sexist male Nashvillian Neanderthals could possibly ignore this special offer. (And perhaps, too, the poor women they purportedly tell how to vote.)

Amendment 5 not only guts term limits, it also installs much-needed gender neutral language into the term limits section of the charter. In practical terms, it changes wording from “councilmen” to “councilmembers.”

How to choose? 

Keep term limits by voting NO? Or accept weak limits but fasten onto the freedom to stand on your own two feet and proudly say, “councilmember”? 

I tremble at the tendered trade-off.

Turns out, luckily, that Nashville voters can keep their term limits and use gender neutral terms too. The following ballot measure, Amendment 6, updates the entire charter with gender-neutral language. 

NO on Amendment 5, YES on Amendment 6.

Whew! 

That was close.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

Lie, Cheat AND Steal

Memphis, City Council, term limits, lie, cheat, steal

Sometimes lying just isn’t enough. But dishonest politicians have additional weapons at their disposal. There’s cheating. And stealing, too.

Meet the Memphis City Council.

Apparently fearful that their official fibbery through deceptive ballot wording on three council-referred measures won’t be enough to successfully hoodwink a majority of voters, the council has decided to ramp the chicanery up a notch.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the ordinances were intentionally written by the city council and its attorney to confuse voters,” writes Bruce VanWyngarden, editor of The Memphis Flyer. “They are attempting to extend term limits from two terms to three terms, but they don’t have the courage to ask for it honestly.”

That’s the lying. And here’s where stealing jumps ahead of cheating.

Last week, the city council voted 5-3 to snatch upwards of $40,000 in city money and spend it, as the Memphis NBC affiliate reports, “in support of extending term limits, suspending instant runoff voting, and repealing instant runoff voting.”

Council Chairman Berlin Boyd says the goal “is merely educating the constituents and letting them know our position on these referendum items.” But it is the constituents’ money, city tax dollars, not a political slush fund for the Council.

Furthermore, the people’s money should never be spent for or against a question on the ballot. That’s . . . cheating.

“They are trying to undo the will of the voters,” argues Steve Mulroy, a law professor and instant runoff activist, by “misappropriating public funds” for “a propaganda campaign.”

Precisely.

To keep things in perspective, however, let’s acknowledge that the Memphis City Council has not dismembered anyone with a bonesaw.

Yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability government transparency incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders nannyism political challengers Regulating Protest term limits too much government

Strange It Is

Arlington, Texas, term limits, democracy, initiative,City Council,

Strange for the Arlington, Texas, City Council to hold a meeting on a Sunday evening, much less one to “consider suspending the city charter.”

That is how the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported “the latest twist in the term limit controversy that has engulfed the city with a lawsuit and competing ballot proposals.”

Led by Zack Maxwell, citizens in this Fort Worth adjacent community of 400,000 gathered 11,000 voter signatures to place a term limits charter amendment on the November ballot. It would limit councilmembers to three two-year terms. It also figures in past service, so five of the eight current councilmembers would be blocked from seeking re-election in the coming two years.

With swift legislative prowess, the council responded, passing its own competing “term limits” measure, which incidentally allows them to stay 50 percent longer in office.

But there’s one problem: the council did not follow the law, which requires multiple readings, with one at a regular meeting. 

Actually, there’s a second problem: Mr. Maxwell challenged the council’s unlawful action in court. 

The court blocked the council’s measure. 

That left the council holding an unusual weekend meeting to suspend the rules and re-pass their fumbled alternative to the term limits voters really want. But news travels fast and city hall was “packed.” 

“You’re suspending the rules because your jobs are in jeopardy,” charged one man.

A woman told the council, “You guys should be absolutely embarrassed about this.”

“After hearing from dozens of angry residents,” the paper explained, “[t]he council voted unanimously to not suspend the rules, finally killing its own term limit proposal.”

Politicians doing the right thing . . . having exhausted every other possibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

PDF for printing

 

Photo from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

 

Categories
Accountability folly general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders nannyism responsibility too much government

Minimum Sense

Washington, D.C., City Council, Representation, democracy, initiative, minimum wage, association, Counsel,

Suddenly, the Democrats who dominate the Washington, D.C., City Council seem unwilling to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers — despite their official support for legislative minimum wage rate increases.

And a vote of the citizens.

Initiative 77, which passed easily last month, requires restaurant employers to incrementally increase the “tipped wage” until rates “reach what will be the uniform minimum of $15 an hour by 2025.”

“Initiative 77 is something I believe will be very harmful to our restaurants and, more importantly, our restaurant workers,” argues Councilman Jack Evans, one of three council members pledging repeal.

A spokesperson for One Fair Wage DC, calling a repeal “deeply undemocratic,” notes that “D.C. voters don’t like it when Republicans in Congress do it, and we trust council will not stoop to that level.”

Yet it would not be “the first time the city’s lawmakers overturned a decision by the electorate,” the Washington Post reminds readers, citing “a decision in 2001 when the D.C. Council overturned term limits approved by voters.”*

I’m all for ballot measures to decide any issue the people have a right to decide . . . limited by all of our inalienable rights as individuals. Minimum wage laws constitute an abuse of our First Amendment right to association, which neither legislatures nor voters may legitimately abridge.

That the council doesn’t recognize this right of association, yet nonetheless thinks it should nullify a vote of the people tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of representation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

* And even quoting moi on the incredible hypocrisy dating back 17 years: “If you’re in a city struggling to get representation in the first place, that’s a terrible signal to say that your own local officials don’t respect their own citizens.”

 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders moral hazard political challengers responsibility term limits too much government

Graceless Memphis Politicians

instant-runoff elections, Memphis, city council, government, term limits,

“We could care less about instant runoff voting,” fibbed Allan Wade, the city attorney for Memphis, Tennessee.

Wade was rebutting the recent Commercial Appeal revelation that Memphis’s “City Council worked behind the scenes to find a sponsor for legislation this year that could ban instant-runoff elections statewide.”

After long relying on the mayor’s lobbyists, was it purely coincidental that the council suddenly spent $120,000 on its own Nashville lobbyists?

One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis), missed the memo. He acknowledged being “approached . . . on the council’s behalf to ask if he would again sponsor the bill.” A lobbyist also confirmed to the Memphis Flyer that the council engaged him to push the ban on what is also known as ranked choice voting.

So, the city council is directly lobbying the Tennessee Legislature to overrule their city’s residents — who voted 71 percent YES for instant runoff voting in 2008.

And there’s a twist. The council has placed two measures that would repeal instant runoff voting on this November’s ballot, hoping to somehow convince voters to scrap the reform. Wait . . . why lobby the legislature when the voters are already set to make the decision?

Oooooooooohhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Now they are using our money to take away that choice from us,” protests Aaron Fowles with Save Instant Runoff Memphis.

This city council — in addition to their sneaky, anti-democratic assault on instant runoff voting — has also placed a measure on the ballot to weaken their own term limits, passed by an 80 percent vote.

To paraphrase Memphis’s King, these rabid-dog politicians ain’t never caught a rabbit and they ain’t no friends of ours.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

P.S. After media coverage, a hearing on the Senate version of the bill to ban instant runoff voting, SB 2271, was abruptly postponed for three weeks.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
First Amendment rights

Shut Up, the City Council Explained

South Pittsburg council members are tired of criticism.

So they’ve outlawed it.

Officials in the “tidiest town in Tennessee” say that the negativity hampers their work.

According to Ryan Lewis’s report in Times Free Press, the policy, passed in December, forbids city employees, contractors, vendors and “anyone associated with the town in an official capacity who uses social networks” from publishing criticism “about the city, its employees or other associates” on such networks.

Only one council member, Paul King, voted No. The new law is “telling me what I can say at night. I call that freedom of speech. I can’t understand that.”

Jane DawkinsCity officials like Mayor Jane Dawkins (pictured) seem to conflate criticism as such, including merely untrue criticism, with “out-and-out lies,” and to regard censoring all criticism as an okay means of preventing alleged lies. But their blanket action goes way beyond any reasonable resort to defamation laws, which require more than mere putative falsehood, let alone putative negativity, to prove an actionable civil wrong.

Even if affected parties were assenting explicitly to the new policy, no agreement to forfeit one’s basic rights — whether freedom of speech or association, trial by jury, or any other — is properly enforceable.

The proper function of government is to protect these rights.

Not to violate them — even if officials are terribly annoyed by their exercise.

Every South Pittsburg council member who voted for this edict should be tossed out of office in the next election. If not sooner.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.